[dadkins]

I just want to point out that the answer is shift work. Here's an example of an SRE job at a national lab:

https://lbl.referrals.selectminds.com/jobs/site-reliability-...

"Work 5 shifts per week to monitor the NERSC HPC Facility, which includes 2 - 3 OWL (midnight - 8am) shifts. Some days may be onsite, some may be offsite. The schedule will be determined by staffing needs."

40 hours per week, full salary, full disclosure about the night shifts, but none of this 24x7 wake up in the middle of the night on top of your regular job bullshit that the tech industry insists on.

[fsckboy]

there's nothing wrong with shift work, and there's nothing wrong with the graveyard shift (for people who want that job), but there is a LOT wrong with alternating day and night shifts in the same week every week, and nobody should agree to do that. (perhaps if you are in your early twenties you feel like you can handle it, but I'm not sure that's a good idea either)

[eestrada]

I tried graveyards and swing shifts in my twenties. I only did it for a year, but it wrecked my sleep schedule for years afterward; I struggled with insomnia because of it. Not sure there is any age where this works.

Some people can handle it better than others. I'll never do it again though.

[fsckboy]

some of the people I know who've made it work, and I'm not recommending this either, are "hardworking ambitious immigrant" types who do it to hold down two full time jobs. tends to be in industries where the overnight shift is a quiet shift rather than something like running the same factory at full tilt overnight.

[anal_reactor]

My natural rhythm makes me a nocturnal being, while the society works 9 to 5. Once I realized this, it became obvious why I feel like fuck all the time. Can't wait to retire.

[lolinder]

Shift work sucks more than on call for me. I like having a flexible schedule that I can work whenever I want, and I'll happily take the remote risk that I'll get paged during my one week per quarter on call rotation in order to guarantee that no one expects me to be on during set hours the rest of the year.

I think the problem isn't on call itself, it's that a lot of companies suck at on call. If your rotation is every 3 weeks and you get woken up in the night at least once per rotation, then yeah, that's awful. But the problem you have in that case is that stuff is always on fire and you don't have enough people on the rotation, not with on-call as a concept.

[hx8]

I'd take a night-shift job over being on call ontop of a 9-5.

I think the real answer here is to have team members on multiple continents. Have some team members NA/EU/Asia then it's always reasonable hours for someone to deal with the production problem. High priority issues can be worked on around the clock without anyone working overtime.

[lolinder]

That's still shift work. It's still the company assuming that I'll be available during N specific hours of the workday in order to fix issues.

Look at it this way:

If I work a job where I'm expected to be on 9-5, 46 weeks per year, 40 hours each week, that amounts to 1840 hours of scheduling my life around my employer.

If I work a job where I can schedule my work however I like and also have on call 1 week out of every quarter, the worst case scenario there is 672 hours of scheduling my life around my employer (and in practice the demands of on call in my current rotation are far less than that). The rest of my life I can schedule as I please, so long as I do my job.

I would rather take the option that minimizes the number of hours where my employer gets to tell me where to be.

[fsckboy]

I know plenty of friends (mostly medical) who've had "on call" shifts on top of their 9 to 5, but in those cases it was pretty exceptional for them to actually receive a call, and the "interruptions" would be a small number of hours.